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Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

"Chatbots" on company websites are basically useless and clueless, and that's nothing new.

But don't you worry, soon they will all be integrated with ChatGPT. This will not make them less useless and clueless, but they will gain the ability to authoritatively gaslight you as well!

This will take "you're holding it wrong" to a whole new automated level!

Progress!

19 comments
samir, talks too much

@rysiek That’s just what I wanted! Now the chatbot won’t just fail to solve my problem, it’ll insist on having a conversation about it!

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

@samir better, it will insist you never had a problem in the first place, and whatever product you were trying to use — you were holding it wrong.

samir, talks too much

@rysiek With the broad training set, I wonder if they’ll start recommending competitors…?

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

@samir certainly not. There will be filters for that kind of unacceptable behavior that goes against company policy.

Just go ahead and try asking ChatGPT about what "open" means, and then ask how that squares with OpenAI closing all the research. And watch it twist itself into rhetorical knots.

samir, talks too much

@rysiek I expect you’re very right. That makes it far less fun.

T0╳F01Æ

@rysiek 0

0 is the number of times I wanted to use a chat bot instead of reading an FAQ page.

Philip Mallegol-Hansen

@T0xF01AE @rysiek And when the docs don’t answer my question: 0 is the number of times a chat bot has been able to help.

It (not surprisingly) doesn’t know any more than the docs fed into it. If I already read them, how is it helpful to force me to work out the special secret keywords to make the bot actually put me in a human support queue?

(Of course the answer is: Because people don’t read the docs)

funnymonkey

@rysiek None of the accuracy, all of the confidence!

Scarlett 🌌 :v_bi: :autism:

@rysiek I may be biased because I have overal terrible experience being assisted by humans in the support of various services, but I don't think this will necessarily be bad, as long as you can bypass the chatbot and be directed to a human if needed.

There's also already good AI-based bots being used in some services. Not sure if one I stumbled upon recently was ChatGPT based, but I had trouble finding how to unsubscribe from a paid service, and it immediately gave me the link to unsubscribe within a single message.

Sure, any company that decides to implement ChatGPT just because of the hype (and to save money) without making any adjustments to tailor it to their specific service (and skipping safeguards), is bound to be a disaster, I agree there ‐ but there are ways to do this that *could* work and could be helpful for everyone involved (especially handling minor and simple requests), I'd like to think.

Although there are a lot of "ifs" there... but yeah.

@rysiek I may be biased because I have overal terrible experience being assisted by humans in the support of various services, but I don't think this will necessarily be bad, as long as you can bypass the chatbot and be directed to a human if needed.

There's also already good AI-based bots being used in some services. Not sure if one I stumbled upon recently was ChatGPT based, but I had trouble finding how to unsubscribe from a paid service, and it immediately gave me the link to unsubscribe within...

hojomo

@rysiek No problem, we're all learning NOT to trust anything a GPTBot comes up with! All we will do is NOT trust the sites they appear on! Knowing the businesses are just using them to cut jobs and/or sell crypto 😉

noodlejetski :verified_gay:

@rysiek I can't wait to be told to look for a section of the website that doesn't exist and has never existed.

mortenalver

@rysiek my favourite chatbot is on the web page of a relatively big company in Norway. It answers all questions (as far as I can tell) by pointing to the e-mail contact form, and it has limited opening hours 🤣

Leszek

@rysiek
1. Prime the bot with opposite of what's in the contract.
2. Ask questions about the contract.
3. Get to the sale phase just before signing.
4. File a report to the local consumer protection agency.
5. No profit since EU doesn't have punitive damages that are paid to the reporting party. :(

mtjm

@rysiek I think it's not a new feature, at least for ISP monopolies here.

Stories of wizards using magic spells to bind daemons were cool, until I had to speak these so the chatbot would send humans to repair disconnected or burnt telephone wires while trying to convince me that it might magically fix itself and I should call them to cancel the repair, or that it might be my issue with my computer. (Human support worked similarly, but I was able to normally talk to them.)

Amos Defamos
@rysiek I'm just waiting for a service to have the brilliant idea of giving it access to their billing and accounting systems so people find ways to get it to set their bills to $0.00
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